How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes

I N T R O D U C T I O N
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continues to pay a heavy personal price. At 82 he remains 
incarcerated in federal prison. 
But before he turned his attention to taxes, Irwin Schiff made 
a name for himself as an economist. 
He was born in 1928 in New Haven, Connecticut, the eighth 
child of a lower-middle-class immigrant family. His father was 
a union man, and his entire extended family enthusiastically 
supported Roosevelt’s New Deal. When he entered the 
University of Connecticut in 1946 to study economics, 
nothing in his background or temperament would have 
led anyone to believe that he would reject the dominant 
orthodoxy, and to instead embrace the economic views 
espoused by the out-of-fashion Austrians...but he did. 
Irwin always had the power of original thinking, which, 
combined with a rather outsized belief in himself, perhaps 
led him to sense that the lessons he was learning did not fully 
mesh with reality. Digging deeper into the full spectrum of 
economic theory, Irwin came across books by libertarian 
thinkers like Henry Hazlitt and Henry Grady Weaver. 
Although his conversion was gradual (taking the full decade 
of the 1950’s to complete), he eventually emerged as a full- 
blooded believer in sound money, limited government, 
low taxes, and personal responsibility. By 1964, Irwin 
enthusiastically supported Barry Goldwater for president. 
At the 1944 Bretton Woods Monetary Conference, the 
United States persuaded the nations of the world to back 
their currencies with dollars instead of gold. Since the United 
States pledged to exchange an ounce of gold for every 35